Misunderstood Communism

After I left communist Hungary, my greatest frustration was with those who sympathized. With the slightly condescending “you poor victim of totalitarianism….” attitude. The anti-communist West pictured communism in black and white, the Gulags and the propaganda, neither of which had much to do with real life.
In that real life, I had many friends, the summers were beautiful, the sexual revolution was raging just like in the West. We did not have access to all the goods the West produced, but what we were able to get, was appreciated far more than in the West. Hidden History: An Exp... Donald Jeffries Best Price: $8.00 (as of 07:20 UTC - Details)

The problem with the Western perception of communism is that both sides are using a fundamentally moralizing approach to very pragmatic problems.

• The left sees its lofty goals and grandiose promises while the right looks at its most inhuman excesses.
• The left is pointing to its supposed and nominal social rights while the right bemoans the loss and suppression of individual rights.
• The left is smitten by its cheerful propaganda, the right is appalled by its blatant lies.

The real problems of communism were, of course, in the grey, depressing middle.
In the details that are hardly ever talked about.

The problems

• In a system of strictly enforced centralized decision making, there can be no healthy economy.
• In a system without a healthy civil society, there can be no morality.
• In a system of compelled conformity, there can be no creativity.

It is important to understand, that these statements are not absolutes. In communist countries, there was (is) a more or less functioning economy, moral behaviour and creativity, but all of it existed DESPITE, not BECAUSE of the system that can only function on the remnants of attitudes, instincts and social conditioning that evolved over thousands of years of civilizational evolution. People living in communist countries are still humans.

Communism/socialism is a paradox that can only exist on the values it aims to replace.

There are two essential works to help you understand the economic aspects of the problem:

• Mises’: Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth
• And Hayek’s Nobel prize lecture on the pretense of knowledge

Mises explains how planning is impossible without market signals, while Hayek explores the pitfalls in the arrogance of the central planners. Herbal Antibiotics: Wh... Jones, Mary Check Amazon for Pricing.

In the first post of this series, I made the case for the value of distributed decision making.
The closer you are to the object of the decision, the more you can take into account the details that are needed to make the appropriate ones.
The further away you are from the details, the more of those details you will have to disregard in your decisions.
Communism is the ultimate example of centralized decision-making with a strictly enforced decision making hierarchy. Central planners are so far removed from the details, that it is not possible for them to even know what they are.
The pretense of knowledge is not driven by nefarious intent, but sheer necessity.
Marx called his economic delusions and political phantasies ‘science’.
The moment you buy into the ideology, you have to start treating Marx’s seriously confused ideas as gospel. Every communist had to treat them as such. Since the foundational questions – who will make decisions based on what information – could not be addressed, reality had to be shaped into matching the ideology-based projections. Of course it didn’t work. Ever.

In centrally planned economies there is constant waste on the one hand, shortages on the other;
black-markets and petty corruption, theft of public resources and bribes to get proper services or goods from the shadow economy.

Let me state it again, that all of this corruption was essential for some sort of economic functioning. The communist authorities were naturally blaming all problems on the people for not being in line with the ideology. If we were good communists, everything would be working fine – we were told.

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